The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  Elizebeth and her teammates solved the message about the Chilean sergeant who infiltrated the navy’s gunnery school and escaped with its secrets. They watched in real time as the confidential agents of Germany and Argentina conspired to flip the chessboard of global politics together. Thanks to the Cryptanalytic Unit’s successful assault on Circuit 3-N, Elizebeth understood the structure of Nazi espionage in South America. The money, the actors, the codes, the connections—she had the map now.

  She forwarded her decrypts along the chain as fast as possible, often annotating them with brief written notes describing the named agents and explaining what they seemed to be doing.

  Luna is probably Gustav Utzinger, the radio expert of the spy ring.

  This is the latest in a series of messages dealing with the attempt of the German espionage ring, members of the Argentine general staff and the Brazilian integralists to form an anti-US bloc in South America.

  These were ULTRA messages, stamped TOP SECRET ULTRA at the top.

  By now, thanks to Elizebeth’s ULTRA decrypts and those of British codebreakers, everyone in the English-speaking spy world knew that Argentina was conspiring with the Nazis. The ULTRA messages were clear.

  But they were also forbidden fruit. The Allies would have liked to show the decrypts to the Argentine government and demand that they stop. But then, of course, the Argentines would know that the Allies had broken the Nazi codes, and then the Argentines would tell the Nazis, and the lifeblood of ULTRA would instantly stop flowing through the world of Allied intelligence—a catastrophe.

  There seemed to be no way out of this bind until October 1943, when Elizebeth solved messages from Circuit 3-N describing plans to dispatch an envoy named Osmar Hellmuth to negotiate a weapons deal between Germany and Argentina. This seemed to provide the Allies with an unprecedented opportunity. A relatively obscure Argentine man, this Hellmuth, was working very closely with Nazis, and he was about to get on a ship and sail to Bilbao, Spain. Perhaps he could be intercepted en route and forced to divulge his Nazi contacts. The Allies could say they got the information from the confession, not the Enigma messages that Elizebeth had solved. Then British and U.S. officials could finally take steps to disrupt the Nazi network in Argentina without exposing the ULTRA secret.

  This plan required a bold and possibly illegal act by the British. Hellmuth was a diplomat. He had protections. He could not simply be kidnapped. Could he?

  The British yanked Osmar Hellmuth off his ship in the middle of the night. They ignored his diplomatic privileges. They did not listen to his protests and did not allow him to make a phone call to his embassy. The Cabo de Hornos had been docked in the port of Trinidad before departing for Spain. The British placed Hellmuth on a different ship, bound for England. It sailed east across the Atlantic and arrived in Portsmouth, England, on November 12, 1943. From there the confused and indignant Hellmuth was carried to a secret interrogation facility in a mansion in southwest London called Camp 020, part of a network of nine interrogation centers operated during the war by MI5, British counterintelligence.

  Argentine officials made frantic calls to British diplomats and asked where their citizen was. The British diplomats claimed they didn’t know.

  He was placed in solitary confinement at Camp 020 for the first two weeks. The guards confiscated his seven trunks of gifts for German officials and the letter with the details of the precision instruments he was supposed to purchase. Then the prisoner was brought to see the commandant of the facility, Colonel Robin Stephens, a broad-shouldered man who wore the tan wool jacket of a British military commander, medals pinned above the left breast. A monocle affixed to his right eye made him look like a broken owl. His men called him “Tin Eye.” His motto regarding the art of interrogation was “truth in the shortest possible time.” He always said he did not believe in torture—he claimed he was so skilled at eliciting confessions that he did not need to use it—but after the war former Camp 020 prisoners told credible stories of being beaten by Stephens’s men, whipped, subjected to mock executions, deprived of sleep for long periods, made to stand in excruciating “stress positions,” and starved.

  “I am speaking with authority,” the commandant told Hellmuth, “and full authority of Great Britain in war. My observations do not invite any replies from you and I shall regard any interruption as an incipient indiscipline.”

  Stephens started to berate the prisoner. He said that the British had confiscated his letter asking him to buy precision instruments for the spies of the Reich, proving that he was a Nazi spy. He said Hellmuth was a Nazi stooge, in way over his head, playing a game he did not understand. Stephens made fun of the gifts in Hellmuth’s trunks: “There are about seven trunks of gifts. Food for the pot-bellied masters of Germany. Silk stockings for their clod-hopping women. Chocolates for their sniveling children.” Stephens said that Hellmuth’s only chance for escaping this facility was to tell the full truth and reveal everything he knew about the Nazi spy network in South America. “When you lie, we shall know instantly.”

  Hellmuth stalled for a few days as the interrogators of Camp 020 demanded information. Initially the British found him to be “possessed, almost arrogant.” Hellmuth claimed he did not know much about SS intelligence activities in Argentina; he was familiar with one or two Germans from social circles and that was all. The interrogators asked about the man they knew only as “Sargo”—the man they suspected was “the head of Himmler’s faction in Buenos Aires” and “the prime mover of the secret mission.” The power behind the scenes, the Nazi mastermind in South America. Who is “Sargo”? What is his real name? What is his rank? Hellmuth said he did not know. He began so many sentences with the word probablemente, “probably,” that the interrogators became infuriated and banned him from saying it ever again.

  Eventually, the interrogators said that if he didn’t start talking, his treatment in the camp “must necessarily deteriorate,” a hint he would be tortured.

  Hellmuth softened. He told the British about how Argentina had worked with the SS to depose the Bolivian government and install a Nazi-friendly dictator. He told them about the clandestine radio stations and the radio technician who ran them, Gustav Utzinger, code name “Luna.”

  Most important of all, Osmar Hellmuth divulged the secret that his British interrogators had been burning to know. Hellmuth’s confession, made possible by Elizebeth’s decryptions, would soon spark a fantastic chain of global events, forever turning the tide of the Invisible War in the Allies’ favor.

  Who is “Sargo”?

  Poor and unlucky Osmar Hellmuth, cold and alone, had been wondering for weeks if his personal sense of honor was worth this suffering, and now he decided it was not. “Sargo,” he told his captors, was Siegfried Becker, an SS captain, age thirty-two, five foot ten with a strong build and blond hair.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Doll Lady

  While the Nazi spies waited for news of Hellmuth’s mission, not knowing that he had been kidnapped, they upgraded their security procedures in Argentina.

  Since arriving here, Becker and Utzinger had encrypted hundreds of messages by typing them on Lily, their miniature Kryha. These were Red messages, meant for their SS superiors in Berlin. The springs and holes of the Kryha were now wearing out from overuse, and Utzinger asked Berlin to smuggle them a new cipher device through Becker’s network of wolves.

  Instead of a Kryha, Berlin sent a new Enigma machine.

  “Enigma arrived via RED,” Utzinger reported to Berlin on November 4, 1943. “Thank you very much.” He typed this message on his older Enigma machine, the Green machine. He went on, “From our message 150 we shall encipher with the new Enigma . . . LUNA.”

  “It is a birthday surprise for LUNA,” Berlin replied.

  Utzinger now possessed three Enigmas. Throughout November and December 1943 he flashed Enigma messages to Berlin, newly confident in the security of his codes and increasingly upbeat about the prospects of his spy organization. />
  Momentum in South America seemed to be shifting in their favor. Right-wing movements continued to surge, and Becker and Perón were making progress in flipping governments. On December 20, 1943, a right-wing Bolivian general named Gualberto Villarroel occupied the presidential palace in La Paz with his troops, assuming power in a successful coup. Becker and his Bolivian conspirators had set the coup into motion. The spy was elated. He arranged a meeting between Juan Perón and a Brazilian Integralist leader; Perón told the Brazilian that the “first fruit” of the continent-wide revolution had been plucked and would soon spread to “Chile, Paraguay, Peru and even Uruguay.” The bloc of Hitler-inspired regimes, the Argentine revolution, the transplantation of fascist ideology to the soil of South America—these were no longer dreams but projects already begun, and any project begun has a chance of being completed.

  Eight days after the coup in Bolivia, on December 28, 1943, Becker and Utzinger radioed warm greetings to Berlin, signing the message, as ever, with their code names. “We extend hearty wishes for a happy, successful New Year to all our loved ones and comrades in the war-torn homeland,” wrote the SS spies. “Our thoughts are always with you and our Führer. SARGO, LUNA, and all collaborators.”

  Elizebeth never experienced a catharsis like soldiers do on a battlefield, a decisive moment when she got to stand over her fallen enemy with a sword and plunge a killing stroke into his heart. Rather, all through the war, she dissected fascists in the dark. If you were her adversary you never felt the blade go in. You bled slowly, painlessly, for months or for years, from tiny internal wounds, and then sometimes there was a terrible morning when you woke up groggy and confused, and your kidney was sitting in a bowl of ice on the counter.

  She knew about the new Enigma machine sent to Argentina in November 1943—the Red Enigma—because the spies had discussed its delivery in Green messages and she had been reading those for a while.

  The Red Enigma posed a new challenge for the codebreakers. It turned out that Berlin had forgotten to include keys in the shipment. This forced them to send a new key to Argentina over the radio. To protect that key, to keep it extra safe, Berlin decided to double the crypto. They sent Argentina a series of twenty-seven messages that were encrypted twice: first with a Kryha machine (using a new Kryha key), then with the new, Red Enigma. In other words, the plaintexts were typed on the Kryha, generating ciphertexts, and then those ciphertext letters were typed on the Enigma, generating a second set of ciphertext letters.

  It wasn’t possible for the coast guard to read the messages in depth because the crypto was doubled. The messages were like gnarly logs of wood covered with two distinct layers of bark. All the same, with hints from three sources—their own prior solutions, the navy’s IBM machine, and the Germans themselves—the codebreakers found a way to strip off the bark and saw the wood into neat two-by-fours of plaintext. In an earlier message, Berlin had said that the new Kryha key incorporated part of the old key, which the coast guard already possessed. This reduced the number of possibilities for the new key, allowing the codebreakers to write a punch-card program that sorted the ciphertexts and aligned them in proper depth. Now the codebreakers could solve the plaintexts as usual and work backward toward the wiring.

  During December 1943 and January 1944, as the coast guard worked toward a complete solution of the Red Enigma, wheel wiring and all, the team’s prior solutions started to pay off on an international scale. Solving messages on Circuit 3-N had given Allied officials a priceless view of Nazi espionage in South America, and now, with Osmar Hellmuth’s confession in hand, American and British diplomats were able to hammer Argentina for its cozy relations with Nazi spies. The pressure proved too great, and on January 26, 1944, the Argentine government announced that it was severing all relations with Germany and Japan. Argentina had been the Nazis’ last friend in the West, the “last neutral bulwark,” and now that bulwark was destroyed.

  The following month, the coast guard solved the wiring of Red, their third Enigma of the war.

  On February 19, 1944, Elizebeth’s commander, Lieutenant Jones, sent a secret cable to Bletchley Park informing the British of the team’s achievement:

  CG have solved . . . red. Details later.

  Five days later, Jones transmitted the wiring details for all three wheels:

  Following is wiring for new . . . red machine . . .

  Outside wheel

  P R Y B G A U T E V M K C Q D S J W L O F Z I X H N . . .

  The British codebreakers, always competitive, sent a cable back, notifying the coast guard that they had just solved Red themselves:

  Many thanks. As this has just been solved here, details not required.

  The SS in Berlin heard that Argentina had severed relations with Germany the same way everyone else did. They saw it in the news: a Reuters report of January 26, 1944. That day Berlin sent a panicked radio message to its spies in Argentina, begging for information on what happened. “We urgently need reports, whether it is true, and reports on the backgrounds and purpose.”

  The South America section of AMT VI had recently gained a new commander: Kurt Gross, the corrupt former Gestapo agent who nagged his agents to send him chocolates, and he now made a series of catastrophic assumptions. Unable to imagine that Elizebeth or any other adversary had been able to break their codes, Gross guessed that one of Becker’s “wolves,” the Spanish couriers, had betrayed him. “We cannot ward off the impression that there is a leak in your courier organization,” he radioed to Argentina. “We suggest urgently once more that you scrutinize the men most critically.”

  Gross told the spies in Argentina to redouble their efforts. “Operation concerning USA and South America must now even more go on in full revolutions,” Gross radioed. “Himmler’s motto for 1944 is: ‘We shall fight as long and no matter where, until the damned enemy gives up.’ ”

  Throughout the early months of 1944, Allied planes bombed Berlin. The headquarters of AMT VI suffered a direct hit. The spies’ family members in Berlin used AMT VI’s wireless to report that they were still alive. “Dear DARK EYE,” began one message from Utzinger’s girlfriend, “Blue Eye.” “Air raids of Tommy cannot shake us . . . With the old zest and with ‘Heil Hitler.’ Your BLUE EYE.” Utzinger’s grandmother, “the Ahnfrau,” wrote, “Here, life goes on, in spite of everything. With scornful and triumphant laughter, amid the ruins of homes, we take up our work immediately, with suppressed fury, in cardboard and wooden compartments.”

  Gross needed to hear good news from Argentina. His requests to the spies took on a newly apocalyptic tone. In one message, he asked Becker and Utzinger to investigate U.S. chemical weapons stocks and U.S. vulnerability to chemical warfare attacks:

  Chemical warfare materials: What types of fluids or solid substances are on hand or in production? Their appearance? Effect on the body, eyes, respiratory system, clothes, metals. . . . What are the enemy’s means of protection against gas?

  The same week that Argentina announced its break with Germany, in late January 1944, a sharp-eyed reporter for the London Sunday Express noticed U.S. warships massing off the wharves of Montevideo, Uruguay, almost within sight of the Buenos Aires waterfront. He made some phone calls and learned that something big and strange had just happened in the clandestine world of spies and counterspies. He wrote a story.

  BRITAIN SMASHES SOUTH AMERICA SPY RING

  Argentine H.Q. of Hitler’s best agents

  MONTEVIDEO (URUGUAY): The hulls of American men-o’-war were spotted in the sparkling waters of La Plata estuary. The warships were a sign that not much longer would secret German radio stations flash sailing dates and expected routes of Allied troopships and merchantmen to waiting U-boats. They were a sign that the Nazi dream of forming a solid block of Fascist dictatorships across South America is ended now that the Argentine has at last severed relations with Berlin and Tokyo . . . the coup that ended the Argentine’s neutrality, fostered for years by Axis diplomacy and money, was the arrest of O
smar Alberto Hellmuth . . .

  Within a few more weeks the “Hellmuth Affair,” as it came to be known, was splashed across newspapers around the world. It had all the elements of a movie: Nazi masterminds, a pawn doing their dirty work, a kidnapping, a secret interrogation. It was already being spun into legend. Songs were being sung. Young Ziegfield, a popular calypso singer in Trinidad, performed a “Security Calypso” about the hapless Argentine named Osmar Hellmuth:

  He was on his way to cause a lot of trouble

  Osmar Hellmuth that Argentine Consul

  Caught with sufficient incriminating documents

  Offer no alibi to establish innocence . . .

  Just for the matter of a few paltry cents

  He sold his people and lost their confidence

  But in the end they will shoot the scamp

  Because he is safely locked up in one of Britain’s Internment Camps.

  This publicity created immediate problems for two key institutions. One was the Argentine government. The Hellmuth Affair showed that Argentina was colluding at the highest levels with the Nazi state. This was very dangerous for Argentine politicians; they knew that if the Nazis lost the war, the Allies would surely punish them as collaborators. The public break in relations with the Reich wasn’t going to be enough. Argentina needed to do something else, something bigger, more dramatic, to show that it wasn’t a tool of Berlin.

  The second institution that was unhappy about the Hellmuth Affair was the FBI. Here was the juiciest spy tale in the world, playing out within the bureau’s jurisdiction, yet the bureau had been the last to know. The coast guard and the British had withheld their decrypts, fearing that the FBI would leak them. On December 16, 1943, an FBI assistant director sent a peeved memo to Hoover: “It is certain that the information was actually obtained from decodes of the extremely active clandestine radio traffic between Argentina and Europe, which decodes we have been endeavoring to obtain for a long period.”